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Like so much of IT, database security requirements largely depend on the situation and environment. Needs may be completely different from one shop to another, even among different servers in the same shop. This is the problem I have with best practices. They give advice without any context, and ...See More people follow that advice sometimes to their detriment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

A Boulder, Colo.-based startup announced today that it has raised $3.6 million in seed funding to build the commercial version of the SlamData open-source project, helping businesses visualize semi-structured NoSQL data.SlamData, Inc. says that it's using the SlamData project's framework to ...See More create a native analytics platform for NoSQL information, building proprietary security and management features on top of the main feature set.[ Andrew C. Oliver answers the question on everyone's mind: Which freaking database should I use? | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld's Application Development newsletter. ]
+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Most Android phones can be hacked with a simple MMS message or multimedia file + Are you ready to support Windows 10?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Disclaimer: I'm the co-founder and CEO of Metanautix, a big data analytics company that builds products that help large enterprises better manage and analyze their data.In the 1960s, Turing award winner Edsger Dijkstra wrote the heartfelt, "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" that inspired many ...See More other "XYZ Considered Harmful" imitators. The title was intended to challenge orthodox views on a topic. The following four posts is a lighthearted series of posts in that vein.As more and more people in enterprises work with data directly in their day-to-day jobs, companies are wrestling with the right model for the appropriate level of training to achieve results. Does it suffice for people to understand how to interact with spreadsheets? Does it suffice for them to use visual analytics applications like Tableau? An important bar in data literacy is being able to read and write a precise question about data:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

MySQL is easy to install, relatively fast, and loaded with features. If that's not enough, it’s also one of the most prominent flagships of the open source movement, the big success story that showed us that a winning company could be built around open source code.Yet anyone who has worked ...See More with the bits has shaken a fist at the screen on any number of occasions for any number of reasons. You can’t build a technology that stores a bazillion new rows of Internet blather each second and not have a few cracks show.[ Learn how to get started, step by step, with MySQL. | Also on InfoWorld: 10 essential performance tips for MySQL | Track the latest trends in open source with InfoWorld's Linux Report newsletter. ]
In the interest of being cranky this summer, we’ve rolled up eight reasons why the open source relational database of choice sometimes gets us grumbling. Not all of the reasons given below are limited to MySQL alone. Some are broader salvos aimed at relational databases in general. But if we don't think clearly about relational databases and MySQL, we'll be stuck in the 1990s forever. We need to tear down to build up. (Or switch to a newfangled database that hasn't existed long enough for us to develop a list like this.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

We are pleased to announce the availability of Datazen Publisher for Windows 7 Preview.Datazen Publisher is the single point for creation and publishing of rich, interactive visualizations. You can simply connect to the Datazen Server to access your on-premises SQL Server or other enterprise data ...See More sources, easily create beautiful visualizations for any form factor and then publish them for access by others on all major mobile platforms.Datazen Publisher for Windows 7 offers feature parity with the Datazen Publisher app and the UI has been optimized for desktop scenarios. You can now create and publish data visualizations based on your personal preference (mouse & keyboard or touch) or device that you are working on.The Datazen Publisher for Windows 7 Preview is available for download on the Microsoft Download Center. Please visit theWindows Store to install the Datazen Publisher for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1+.

Today, we’re announcing the public preview of Spark for Azure HDInsight and the upcoming general availability of Power BI on July 24th. These investments support our commitment to help more people maximize their data dividends with interactive visualizations on big data.Big data is changing the ...See More way organizations deliver value to their stakeholders. For example, Real Madrid bring soccer matches closer to their 450 million fans and Ultra Tendency project the health impact of nuclear contamination in Japan. Here at Microsoft, we’re thrilled to help fuel that innovation with data solutions that give customers simple but powerful capabilities. This is something we’ve done with Azure HDInsight by making Hadoop easier to provision, manage, customize, and scale. Azure HDInsight is a fully managed Hadoop service, that includes 24x7 monitoring and enterprise support across the broadest range of analytic workloads.Introducing Spark for Azure HDInsightToday, we go further with this vision by providing our customers the best environment to run Apache Spark. Spark is one of the most popular big data projects known for its ability to handle large-scale data applications in memory, making queries up to 100 times faster. Spark lets users do various tasks like batch and interactive queries, real-time streaming, machine learning, and graph processing - all with the same common execution model. With Spark for Azure HDInsight, we offer customers more value with an enterprise ready Spark solution that’s fully managed and has a choice of compelling and interactive experiences. Choice of compelling interactive experiences: Microsoft empowers users and organizations to achieve more by making data accessible to as many people as possible.We have out-of-the-box integration to Power BI for interactive visualizations over big data. Because both are powered by the cloud, you can deploy Spark cluster and visualize it in Power BI within minutes without investing in hardware or complex integration.Data scientists can use popular notebooks like Zeppelin and Jupyter (iPython) to do interactive analysis and machine learning to create narratives that combine code, statistical equations, and visualizations that tell a story about the data with Spark for Azure HDInsight.Microsoft offers flexibility to use BI tools like Tableau, SAP Lumira, and QlikView so you can leverage existing investments. Enterprise Spark: Integrating Spark with Azure HDInsight ensures that it is ready to meet the demands of your mission critical deployments because Azure is always-on, has hyper-scale, and is enterprise-grade. With a 99.9% service level agreement at general availability, you can ensure continuity and protection against catastrophic events. As demands grow, create larger clusters with your choice of SSD and RAM allocation to process big data on demand. Microsoft also has built-in integration with other parts of Azure, like Event Hubs, for building Streaming and IoT related applications.Fully Managed: With Spark for Azure HDInsight, you can get started quickly with a fully managed cluster. This includes 24x7 monitoring and enterprise support for peace of mind. You also have the elasticity of a cloud solution, so you can scale your solution up or down easily, and only pay for the power that you use.In addition to Spark, we announced the upcoming general availability of Power BI on July 24. Power BI is a cloud-based business analytics service that enables anyone to visualize and analyze data with greater speed, efficiency, and understanding. It connects users to a broad range of live data through easy-to-use dashboards, provides interactive reports, and delivers compelling visualizations that bring data to life. Power BI has out-of-the-box connectors to Spark enabling users to do interactive visualizations on top of big data. For more information on this announcement, read James Phillip’s blog post.Microsoft continues to make it easier for customers to maximize their data dividends with our data platform and services. It’s never been easier to capture, transform, mash-up, analyze and visualize any data, of any size, at any scale, in its native format using familiar tools, languages and frameworks in a trusted environment on-premises and in the cloud.Experience interactive insight on big data today with Spark for Azure HDInsight and Power BI.

Loosely speaking, a data lake is the big data version of an operational data store, plus a network storage appliance, plus data processing/query engines, all combined -- typically in a Hadoop cluster augmented by database engines. The concept of the data lake is simple: “pour” in it every ...See More record from any source you can find, and make all this data available to anyone who needs access. This way, there is no "loading bias" or "transformation bias" as to which data is useful and in which form. Everyone finds what they need.At least that's the theory. But is the data lake really helping IT to get more agile, or is it actually slowing things down and making IT harder?Yes, it is helping with agilityThe first and foremost benefit of the data lake is that, because all data is poured into the lake, usually with very little latency, it is therefore available for any usage: analytical, operational, etc. In the pre-data-lake world, if you wanted to use data from system A for your analytics, you needed to request that an ETL job be designed, developed and deployed to get records from system A into your operational data store or other target structure. And the first iteration would rarely be correct, especially if you were exploring a new analysis angle.With the data lake, it's like querying the operational systems directly. Expect that your queries won't risk crashing these systems. And you get a quasi-unified layer to access all the various data -- the second benefit. I am saying quasi-unified because there are still several distinct data processing frameworks and interfaces on top of Hadoop, but it's still easier than doing data joins between an ERP, a database and log files (for example).Where it makes IT harderThe data lake does however create issues that make things harder for IT.Processes born in the data lake are harder to operationalize. This is the flip side of agility. A number of projects using the data lake can be viewed as disposable, and will never graduate from the business or data science team that created them. But when a project shows value, it becomes important for IT to regain control of it before it becomes mission-critical. The early prototype must be hardened, secured, instrumented. Source data loading must be solidified. Because none of this is typically taken into account during the research phase, it usually means rebuilding everything, usually under pressure for expectations are high to see the project go live fast.Data governance and quality are tough to control. The data lake misses metadata. Its real-time nature often precludes proper data quality to be implemented at loading time. As a result, most data lakes actually look more like data swamps! Problems arise when users of the data lake are not attuned to this lack of governance and quality. They blindly trust the data made available to them. Or they make (false) assumptions on the meaning of certain data items, with no metadata reference to help.Lack of security and privacy create real risks. Every application has different security policies and user types. Marketing folks should not have access to data about sales reps bonuses -- and yet they need detailed data about orders and sales productivity. Factory plant managers have no business accessing HR records for their crew -- and yet they must have access to vacation requests to manage capacity. In traditional applications, these permissions and rights have been carefully weighted to prevent leaks and liability. Security management in Hadoop is way behind security in the source systems. The risk that the data lake provides someone with access to data they should not have access to, is real.

Earlier this week, Microsoft reminded SQL Server 2005 users that all support for that product would end in one year, on April 12, 2016.It's not an unexpected development, as SQL Server 2005 has been in the "extended support" phase of its lifecycle since April 2011. But as with its other server ...See More products approaching end of life, Microsoft is pushing existing SQL Server users to migrate to newer products in the SQL Server family, or to Microsoft Azure's database platform.End of support for SQL Server 2005 means no more security patches for the product. But that doesn't include companies that have special arrangements via a Microsoft Premier Support agreement like the ones Microsoft has offered for Windows XP -- although it's unclear if Microsoft will offer 90 percent discounts for SQL Server 2005 support contracts, as it was reported to have done for XP.As with the looming end of life for Windows Server 2003 (July 14, 2015), Microsoft is making the most of the remaining year to push hard for organizations to upgrade. Rather than bang on security alone as a motive, Microsoft devoted more space in the article to touting the performance improvements and high-availability features found in more recent versions of SQL Server.For those planning to upgrade SQL Server on-premises, Microsoft claims SQL Server 2005 can be upgraded in-place to SQL Server 2014 -- provided the former isn't a 32-bit edition of the product. (In such cases, a side-by-side upgrade would have to do.) For those eying a move to Microsoft's cloud, Azure SQL Database v12 offers "nearly complete compatibility" with the stand-alone Microsoft SQL Server product, and Microsoft offers its own open source tool to aid migration.There's little question SQL Server 2005 still has a sizable base of active enterprise deployments. While exact numbers are hard to come by, one public hint of how SQL Server 2005 continues to be used comes from Stack Overflow, where a steady, slow stream of questions tagged "sql-server-2005" continues to show up.Where and how those databases are deployed -- at the enterprise, department, or individual application level -- also matters; deployments further up in the hierarchy and more widespread throughout an organization are tougher to deal with. Applications built with specific regulatory compliance restrictions, for instance, will be harder -- and more costly -- to cycle out.A Forrester-authored, Microsoft-commissioned study has sketched out the costs of migrating to the most recent versions of SQL Server. The migration scenario, a composite created by studying several existing organizations, could could cost as much as $4 million overall, but Forrester claimed those expenses could be recouped within a year. The report concentrates mainly on the overall economic impact of a SQL Server deployment, not on the specific costs associated with upgrading an earlier version of SQL Server in an organization -- especially one as old as SQL Server 2005.The most pressing upgrade emergency remains Windows Server 2003 -- still widely deployed in enterprises and chugging away, with only around three months left before Microsoft pulls the plug on all support for the product.

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I have a bit of a hangover from two back-to-back NoSQL conferences, MongoDBWorld and Couchbase Connect. So I thought I'd try a hair-of-the-dog cure and write about yet another document database: Clusterpoint. This one is "as a service" -- i.e., a cloud-based solution -- and launched in the U.S. market just a few days ago.
Clusterpoint is a Latvian company that's been around since 2006. Its first product was an on-premises search engine, which has evolved into a more standard document database, now located in the cloud.[ Here are 6 skills a solid IT generalist should master, no matter where your life in IT leads. | Get the latest practical data center info and news with Paul Venezia's Deep End blog. ]
I asked Clusterpoint's CEO, Zigmars Rasscevskis, why you'd want to use his solution as opposed to, say, MongoDB or Couchbase. In fact, Rasscevskis sees other DBaaS (database as a service) solutions as his main competiton -- Cloudant, DocumentDB, DynamoDB, and the like.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Data APIs are rapidly becoming a favored conduit for frontend systems -- websites, applications, and mobile apps, but also connected objects -- to gain access to data served by their backend systems. The gains of using APIs are many, among them the ability to properly distribute data between ...See More backend and frontend.Nevertheless, the continuous increase in the diversity of consuming devices and objects is requiring architects to rethink the way APIs were originally designed.Is the reign of the generic API over?
The original intent of building a data API is to reduce the number of entry points into the backend system and streamline the development and maintenance of interface resources. An ancillary benefit of this reduction in the number of interfaces is that having a single API makes it easier to administrate, to secure, to control and to monitor.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here